Roma, Day Uno

Right now i'm sitting on my hotel's fourth floor balcony looking over the streets below. On my right seems to be an apartment complex of some kind with the vatican walls overlooking the area, and on the left is a busy intersection with scooters, vespas, little cars, buses and smart cars.

Across the street is a small ristorante I've yet to check out, right next to a pizza e kebab sore I went to yesterday for a kebab maxi (5 euro). three blocks down, for dinner last night, I went to a pizza place for some kind of pizza with round slices of cheese on top of the cheese already therem with some kind of fish/meat bits in it. yum! the owner guy is from North Africa and toasted the pizza and talked to me for a bit about where i was from before he wrapped up the pizza for walking&eating. The pizza place shares the room with a gelatto area that overlooks the street in front.

To backtrack a bit, at 530 am June 22nd i woke up and got ready (showered) for the flight. V came by to say good bye and gave me a letter to read when I got to Europe, and my uncle came at 7 to take us to SFO. At SFO we took a 1 hour flight (boarded at 10, flight ??) to LAX where we transferred to anoteher United airlines (SUCKS) flight to England's Heathrow Airport (9.5 hour flight).

On the flight to london, UA provided dinner (chicken, or pasta? Pasta, please!) and breakfast (cold chicken, ham and cream cheese sandwhich with strawberry yogurt) and drinks in the middle. Boy did my butt, big as it is, hurt after 5 hours. There was two 3 year old boys behind where I was sitting, who yelled and fought for the entire time, and a baby somewhere that kept crying. However, wth thte eyemask and blow-u[ travel pillow my dad provided me, i napped in 2 hour intervals after finishing Invitcus, a movie about nelson mandela and the South Africa rugby world cup (Morgan Freeman and Matt damon). Once we got to london, it was 630 am london time, and we were sent to Terminal 1 by a worker. We got through the entire customs check security and into the actual terminal before we found out we were supposed to be in Terminal 4 :'[ by then it was around 730 and we took T1 to T4 bus! There was only my mother, padre and i in it! This was the only time i was outside of the heathrow airport, and it was fun watching the driver maneuver a HUUUGE empty bus aruond the airport terminals (approx 10 min ride) . Heh, with all the brit accents and the bus, it felt like a Harry Potter movie! >)

At T4, we had to wait until 1140 to know which terminal Alitalia (airline) was going to be at (flight boarding technically at 1220) so we had a LOT of time to kill! there were a lot of high end shops there, and it was, as airports usually are, verra verra expensive. Mi padre and i ate at Bridge Bar & REstaurant - two large pieces of toast with eggs and peppered salted smoked salmon while he drank coffee. At WHSmith (drugstore-ish place) I spent forty minutes trying to decide which magazine I wanted. What made the decision so hard? Well, unlike America, in the UK the magazines come with free stuff.

Yes. FREE STUFF.

Shampoos, body wash, lip gloss, totes, bags, sunglasses, 3 types of benefit eye penils, etc. How could I resist?! I eventually chose GLAMOUR UK's Women of the Year mag that came with BAD gal eyeliner :) huzzah! My dad bought newspaper that came with free agua. Because we still had 2.5 more hours to kill, I wandered in and out of shops like Boots and Beauty Box (?) and MANGO until my dad got tired. He lay down on a pleather + mental bench and slept for an hour while i erad my new mag. Earlier, we let my mom lying down on a bench somewhere and when we got back, she was nowhere to be found, so we gave up and assumed she woudl show up eventually :) At 1140, we checked the flight and went to gate 3 to look for my mom but she wasnt there! so we went to the Quiet Praryer Room to look for her (yeah, they exist!) but she wasn't there either, so we lay down on these reclining leather chairs to wait until the flight came. At 1220, we went back to check for mi madre, but she still awsn't there! My dad said that if she didnt' show up, we'd still go without her, Heartless! But promptly after he announced that, we heard our names beign called over the loudspeaker to be...exactly where we already were, so we waited until mi madre showed up. I was jet laggy on the 2 hour flight to rome, so i kept winking in and out whiel trying to focus on the view. My head rolled around and drooped and snapped back and forth until we landed.

ROMAAAAAA

We collected our baggage and waited for my sister (flying from lisbon) to meet us at the airport. I went around with mi padre (madre on a bench) to go get cash euros, a roma pass (metro pass and free museums! for 3 calender days, recommended!) and 2 sim cards (from Wind, very nice wrookers in the airport! first extended conversation with english speaking italians who thought i was 16 years old :'[ its the new haircut). We met my sister shortly after wand waited for our driver from the Best estern Hotel to pick us up. He drove a large grey minivan that was super roomy inside and box-like in s hape. he didn't speak a lot of english, but told me that he's been in roma his entire life. There was about an hour's worth of traffic getting to rome, but the view made it worth it! All the cars hwere are ultra tiny, and the driving is insane. WHERE ARE THE BLINKERS, PEOPLE. AND THE SPACE BETWEEN CARS? NONEXISISTENT. i swear i thought the driver was going to hit peoploe and vice versa.

The hotel had a nice lady with a chic asymmetrical black bob and a tall skinny african american man in the front. Our room is on the fourth floor (but in europe, its the 5th! floor 1 is 0 :O )with a balcony with 3 chairs and a table, and inside there's 4 beds (thank god i don't want to share with my sister...)). While my parents unpacked and shoewred, my sister and i went aruond to walka round the city, and my sister bought pizza (1.55 euro) and the kebab for my parents. When we returned 3 blocks later, i went out by myself to the pizza place and bought my own. Next door to our hotel is a small, very cute grocery store that i visited before i went inside.

the hotel has 3 bikes their guests can borrow during the day, and i def plan to utilize that :) I want to ride around and be FOREIGN! At night we walked around the vatican walls to St Peter's square and took a bunch of photos! Then we walked down the street to a night market and bought coffee gelato (2.50) yummy! my sister and i sat on the railings lining the river and talked whil watching the cars and the castles and statues around us. Walking back to the hotel around 11, we passed by a gelatto place with a ton of peoploe outside to check out the prices (1.50 for a small! i'll be back, heart!) and when we got back to the hotel, my sister discovered that the place wwas one recommended by her friend to have the best gelatto around here :)

After taking a shower, and washing my socks i fell asleep.

this morning I showered and waited for my sister to go down to the breakfast provided by the hotel in the lowest floor.

3 juices: misfruit (best!), orange, and grapefruit

3 cereals

5 types of pastries: all dusted with powdered sugar mmmm

toast, 2340928 types of bread with butters, honey, jams and nutella

Freshly cut fruit: watermelon, cantelope, and a mix (pineapples, coconut, kiwi, peachesm, apples, etc)

I'll try more tomorrow :)

the signor serving coffee was lovely.

I stuffed myself and took my favorite pastry to go (round, flaky, sweet, with raisins dotting it). Mi padre, sister and i walked around the markets downt he street until we saw my mom and split up in pairs. My sister and i went back to toudi (?) store next to the hotel to buy bobypins and mousse. I am her sugar momma with them euros. Later we'll tour the vatican museum and sistine chapel.

the weather's pretty warm right now; i'm almost sweating! Everyone's pretty nice here and they either greet you with bongiourno (good morning?) or bona cera (good evening).

This afternoon, italy plays someone in the world cup at 4 so my sister plans to take me to a bar so we can meet some new people! I'm ultra excited. Meeting new people is my favorite part of going to a new country!

Ciao, readers! :)

For the frightened fall as often yet far closer than the brave

We’re the have not’s but the have all’s,

At twice the speed of lightning I travel,

Through the universe I will run to write your name in the stars,

Cos some truths will last forever,

Music can bring the world together,

I got life man I will use it til they lay me down to rest,

So let’s party in the supermarkets,

Move to the rhythm of my heartbeat

10 Ways to Find More Pleasure Everyday

"

. Play that song you love so much. Repeat. As any preschooler can tell you, repetition nurtures pleasure. When you experience something more than once, you notice more details about it each time, thereby increasing your enjoyment. That’s why you love revisiting that jazz standard, favorite roast chicken recipe, and beloved old Woody Allen movie. Of course, you can overdo it. The effect of repetition on pleasure is an inverted U: You appreciate something more and more over time until, abruptly, it becomes repellent to you. Which is why no one you know can bear to listen to that “I get knocked down, but I get up again” song anymore.

2. Seek out the sommelier. In all areas of our lives, our sensory reactions are affected by the depth of our knowledge. Take wine, for example. If you want to enjoy it more fully, you don’t have to shell out hundreds for a bottle of Château Lynch-Bages; you simply need to learn about the vino you are already drinking. Buy a wine encyclopedia, take a class—or head to a restaurant with a sommelier who likes to educate patrons during the meal. You won’t just think about wine differently; you will taste it differently.

3. Don’t buy boxed sets of DVDs. Economist Tyler Cowen says that much of the joy we get from our purchases lies in the experience of seeking them out, getting them home, and opening them up. If you receive 18 DVDs in one package, you’ll use up the buzz all at once. Buy them one at a time and space out the pleasure.

4. Keep your child’s baby shoes in your desk at work. You know how you keep a bag of almonds in your drawer in case you need an energy boost in the afternoon? Place something emotionally resonant there as well for the times your mood needs a quick lift. Stash a few objects that are connected with treasured experiences—say, that 1997 vacation to Barcelona—and occasionally take a moment to pick up one of these items and look at it closely. Elation is sure to follow.

5. Read (or watch or participate in) something that takes your breath away. A recent study found that people seek out newspaper articles that inspire awe—that hard-to-define feeling we get when we’re exposed to great beauty, power, or accomplishment. This pleasurable tickle is uniquely human and can be achieved in multiple ways: praying, watching nature programs, and reading stories of personal triumph, to name a few. Whatever gives you that lump-in-your-throat feeling, pursue it any way you can.

6. Look outside. Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna, surrounded by trees, water, and sky. The world in which most of us spend our time nowadays is unnatural and can corrode the spirit. Even a small dose of nature elevates our mood. But accept no substitutes! Psychologist Peter Kahn Jr. put 50-inch high-definition TVs into windowless offices of faculty and staff members at the University of Washington in Seattle, then streamed in a live view of a natural scene. It turned out that these HDTVs did nothing for the participants’ physiological stress response. What worked? A window with a view of real greenery. My guess is that even a view of a humdrum landscape, like the parking lot of an office building, is more emotionally satisfying than the most beautiful travel poster.

7. Pet a dog (any dog). You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating: Physical contact with animals works wonders. It increases the brain chemicals associated with pleasure and decreases those associated with stress. Even people without pets can get some of the effect by hanging out for a few minutes at a dog run.

8. Grin and bear it. Isn’t it annoying when you’re a little blue and your friends and family tell you to smile? Well, like it or not, smiling is a mood booster. Here’s why: People react better to you when you look happy, leading to a reinforcing cycle of good vibes. Plus, thanks to something called “facial feedback,” looking happy (oddly enough) fools your brain into thinking that you are happy.

9. Give. Humans are altruistic by nature: If we act generously, we feel joyful. Go ahead and try it. Go to the website of a favorite charity and make a donation. It doesn’t have to be a lot—just enough to get a small burst of pride in your chest.

10. Make the bath as hot as you can stand it. Psychologist Paul Rozin has argued that people get a kick from “benign masochism”—that is, controlled exposure to low-level discomfort (think spicy chili peppers and saunas). Maybe we love the endorphin rush. Or just the delightful contrast when we ultimately escape from the pain. Regardless, it pays to pamper yourself occasionally with a bit—but just a bit—of suffering. "

Boy, I would love to pet a dog, specifically, Scout and/or Sadie.

Hint hint.

Countdown

hellh
Ack. One week until Europe.

Destination(s): London, Rome, Paris (and not necessarily in that order)

I should start buying things (like a much-needed pair of pants, perhaps?), but I lean towards sleeping in and slow days watching movies that i've saved for the past year.

I'm definitely most excited for Rome. The idea alone draws out deep, breathy sighs of wistfulness. I consider myself lucky.

Oh summer.

"i don't like standard beauty. there is no beauty without strangeness."

Ham&Oph

Doubt that the stars doth shine,

Doubt that the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.